A Nebraska Ghost Town, With a Name From Mars, May Be Reborn

MARS, Neb. — If you turn north on the two-lane road, keep driving when it becomes gravel and stop near the county line, you can see signs of life on Mars.

As settlers moved west in the 19th century, a few chose to stake their futures on this hilly land in northern Nebraska. The pioneers turned wood, mud and sod into buildings — a school, a post office, a granary, their homes. But as the decades passed, most of this town they worked so hard to create, a place they named Mars, receded back into the hills.

Like so many Midwestern towns that were planted but never quite took root, today’s Mars is more notable for what it was than what it is. Skunks have taken over a crumbling wooden house that dates to the 1800s. An old hog barn has collapsed on itself. The school and post office are long gone. And the patch of dirt where Samuel Haskin, the town’s founder, once had a dugout home is now the site of an archaeological dig.

Were it not for D. R. Haskin, a great-great-grandson of the pioneer, it seems Mars would be largely forgotten, a blank spot on the map.

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D.R. Haskin, a great-great-grandson of the pioneer Samuel Haskin, takes us on a tour through the ghost town of Mars, Neb.Published OnOct. 8, 2014

Mr. Haskin, however, has made it his mission to preserve his ancestors’ legacy by operating a campsite in the former town’s park, writing historical fiction novels about the settlement and excavating the dugout home.

The hope, Mr. Haskin said, is to create a written record and then a living re-creation of Mars, a place that he believes can offer lessons of value far beyond these cornfields and dusty roads.

“There were sacrifices. There was hardship,” Mr. Haskin said. “All of us living in the state of Nebraska owe our lives to the early pioneers.”

To understand what Mars was, you need both a tour guide and an imagination. It would be easy to drive past the former settlement, which was never incorporated or plotted out, without knowing a town had once been there.

Unlike some of its ghost-town cousins in the Wild West, Mars and other faded map dots on the Plains lack the boarded-up saloons and tumbleweed-laden Main Streets that can make preservation and attracting tourists easier.

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A mail wagon carrying members of the Haskin family in 1890. Samuel, the founder of the town, is the passenger in the front seat. His fourth wife, Charlotte, sits behind the driver.Creditvia Haskin Family

M. J. Morgan, a history professor at Kansas State University, studies forgotten towns in that state, where she said there are about 9,000 of them. The reasons that places thrived or faded vary from region to region, and Professor Morgan said the towns’ stories and the pioneers behind them merited study.

“It’s not sentiment. It’s not being drawn to the whole idea of a lost place,” said Professor Morgan, who is the research director at Kansas State’s Chapman Center for Rural Studies. “It’s very much about the vital lives of people and why they came and what they hoped for and what their dreams were. You read the writings, and people literally believed that their little town would grow to rival Chicago or St. Louis.”

Mr. Haskin said his great-great-grandpa never had visions of Mars spawning the next great metropolis. But he did want to make a life, a town and a home for his family.

When it was founded in 1879, Mars was called Jessup, and there were big hopes that the railroad would soon be rolling through. Those trains never came, and the town struggled in its early years. Before long, Jessup lost its post office, a mark of legitimacy and a crucial means of connecting to the outside world.

Eager to win back mail service, the founders proposed a post office about 100 yards north, Mr. Haskin said, just across the Knox County line. They ended up with renewed postal service and, in 1886, a fresh name: Mars, chosen because the town of Venus was a few miles down the road.

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D. R. Haskin, a descendant of Mars’s founder, in an area that was once part of downtown.CreditRyan Henriksen for The New York Times

Even with that new post office and lofty name, Mars failed to grow. It is believed that the population never reached 100. By 1897, Mr. Haskin said, the general store was gone. The post office was shuttered in 1910. The Mars School held on decades longer, even when there was no town to speak of, but it closed in 1960.

Ron Carlson, 67, attended the Mars School as a child and grew up in a small house that for a time lacked indoor plumbing and electricity. Mr. Carlson, a semiretired farmer, now spends most summer weekends in a trailer at the Historic Mars Campground.

Chance Jacobsen, Mr. Carlson’s teenage grandson, has worked part time for years to help keep up the grounds and excavate the dugout home of the original Mr. Haskin. Mr. Carlson said he would play on the site of that dugout as a child and would walk to school through Mars’s former downtown, which today is little more than a patch of grass on a hill. Still, Mr. Carlson said, much of the town’s pioneer history never registered with him until he had grown up and left home.

Through diaries and memories and archaeology, D. R. Haskin has kept the Mars name alive. He hosts an annual party for Samuel Haskin’s birthday (the most recent would have been his 194th) and speaks of using the old granary, which has been restored, and a reconstructed dugout to tell the stories of those long-ago settlers.

Mr. Haskin’s ultimate goal? Simple: “Put Mars back on the map.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Restoring Specks of History From an Ephemeral Town. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe